The present invention relates generally to the field of electrical cables and more specifically to the field of making litz wire.
In a wide variety of applications, litz wire (also called xe2x80x9clitzendraht wirexe2x80x9d) is used to reduce the high frequency impedance of electrical cables. A typical litz wire consists of a number of individually insulated conductors woven together so that each conductor assumes all possible positions in the cross section of the assembly. This arrangement of the conductors tends to reduce high frequency eddy current effects, thereby resulting in lower high frequency impedance.
The woven litz wire, while providing high performance, is sometimes prohibitively expensive for some applications owing to difficulty in its manufacture. Opportunities exist, therefore, to reduce the cost of litz wire and expand the number of applications by finding an alternative, less costly method of manufacture.
The opportunities described above are addressed, in one embodiment of the present invention, by a method of making an electrical cable, the method comprising: bonding a plurality of electrical conductors to respective neighboring ones of the electrical conductors to form a ribbon, the electrical conductors being electrically insulated from the respective neighboring ones; folding the ribbon to form a cable assembly, each of the electrical conductors traversing the width of the cable assembly at least twice; optionally bonding the cable assembly; and optionally coiling the cable assembly.